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THE UK WORK ORGANISATION NETWORK

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How is Resilience Achieved?

Orientation towards learning and development
This is not just about skills and training. When an organisation is truly orientated towards learning and development it is engaged in a continuous endeavour to understand and interpret tasks and roles in new ways. It is characterised by a curiosity to explore and to bring new knowledge and skills into use. Personal development is combined with organisational development. For individuals in such a context, learning is an open-ended process that can refocus our attention in new ways, surprise us, and force us into new relations with world.

Our forms of participation change, our perspectives change, and we might experience life in our organisations in new ways.

Organisations can do a great deal to foster a learning and development orientation through the introduction into day-to-day working life of:

• a blame-free culture in which learning from mistakes happens as a matter of course;
• spaces in which staff at all levels can support each other in problem-solving and can share knowledge and experience of what works and what doesn’t work in their jobs;
• job design which identifies learning as a specific function;
• opportunities for formal training to update or expand skills.

Resources
The following case studies offer further insight into a learning and development orientation:
Cap Gemini
NKT Cables
The Dutch WEBA Instrument offers a highly effective tool for measuring the effectiveness of job design, including its impact on learning and competence development.

Practical advice and actionable knowledge are available from:
ECLO – the European Consortium for the Learning Organisation www.eclo.org/pages/Resources.html

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